Paradise Lost: Paranoia Has Undermined US Democracy
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
The thesis is simplistic though, and can be distilled along pretty obvious classic political theory: every society has to balance liberty against order, and decide how to deploy power to defend its borders. It's the essential question in classic political philosophy from The Republic to Machiavelli and everything that came after.
It's not enough to simply repeat the ancient truism that "power and fear are dangerous," which should be axiomatic by now, particularly coming from a German point of view, which has spent the last half-century-plus contemplating that exact question, from the point of view of having quite dramatically been both oppressed and oppressor in that time frame.
The broad question that needs to become visible and widely discussed in American politics right now is both classic and novel, and quite frankly we need help in guiding this discussion:
The classic question that needs to be resurfaced is, how does the US become self-conscious and more transparent about the specific boundaries we draw between protecting order and establishing liberty?
The novel question in the new post-9/11 context is how to manage that same balance in the ongoing battle for intelligence which by definition requires tremendous secrecy and daring.
It's clear that many both in and outside the US are profoundly uncomfortable with the current state of NSA surveillance and I agree. But what is an appropriate level of surveillance? How can US citizens take back control of that conversation and make deliberate decisions about that kind of society we want to be?
And that's really the underlying problem that I think the Speigel article was simplistically, indirectly getting at: citizens in the US no longer have the democratic power to make those decisions. But in order for the governing powers to trust democratic processes to make those policies, we need to become self-aware and articulate enough to advocate those policies, and bring up leaders that energize and focus that discussion with real statesmanship.
Statesmanship! Where is it? Can it exist in the current broken and polarized political environment?
To the degree that we still have some democratic processes in place we are responsible to say more than just, "Snowden is right!" We have to know what kind of society we actually want to be in this new context.
The enemies and threats are new, but the questions are ancient. We have not yet adapted old answers to the new context. And for that we need not only novel political theoretical solutions, but the strong statesmanship to apply them.
I'll give you the beginnings of an answer by addressing this statement.
The "battle for intelligence" is a fantasy created by those who would wield fear over you. In any society, there is a risk that some people are crazy and murderous. The solution to this is not a battle, but a hospital: care better for the crazy, and the they are far less likely to shoot up their neighbourhood. Negating that risk through a "battle for intelligence" is like negating the risk of bullying at school by installing a constantly monitored camera on every pupil's shoulder and electrocuting any transgressors. It may work, superficially, but it ain't the right solution. The cost isn't worth the benefit.
This addresses internal crazies. What about the external ones who want to destroy America? Same difference. Instead of fighting an endless war, ask why they are trying to "destroy America" in the first place, and fix that. While I do not condone terrorists in any way, the US has a deeply hypocritical foreign policy, and has had that for well over half a century. Change that, consistently for another half a century, and miraculously the hatred against America will vanish.
So the problem begins with your assertion that there is any "battle for intelligence" with a worthwhile definition, let alone one that requires "tremendous secrecy and daring". There isn't. It's all a paranoia in your and your compatriots' heads.
Which funnily enough, is precisely the point of the article.
I doubt this is the goal in and of itself. Just look at the reasoning for regulation of anything regardless of whether it would be effective or not: Control. And in that assumed control, brings power, and some understanding on a pragmatic level that one cannot control everything but the more information one has at their disposal can help them leverage things in their favor. Resources, ability to acquire resources, more power, etc.
Sure it's easy to say its paranoia, but when Correra got the phone call, he knew which way to walk the line on snowden. I'm sure Merkel has got the tap on the shoulder from time to time at g8/g20 or w/e meeting and knew which way to walk as well…
In a world where men make different laws and morals and enforce them how ever they choose, anything goes.
Edit: Here's some history behind institutionalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation#19th_ce.... Some brief reading tells me that is was dropped in favor of community health polices. So I guess some of the shortcomings of today are because of our local communities inability (or unwillingness) to deal with these issues? Hardly surprising when the favored behavior is to elect someone who parades themselves to do just that…
Unfortunately for both of us, the truths of Machiavelli are not easily defeated, least of all by something as saccharine as "make love not war." The most tyrannical and imperialistic societies in history, from Rome to Stalin, often began with variations on such noble sentiments.
"Care better for the crazy." In other words, anyone who means to do harm to the republic should be institutionalized? How? By force I assume. Who defines "crazy"? The history of international conflict unfortunately is not a story of the rational and benevolent vs. the "crazy and murderous", but of competing ideologies, scarce resources, and plain corruption.
The problem with such naivete is that it assumes the problem is theoretical, and merely needs the correct sociological constructions and psychological theory implemented by benevolent institutions.
But how do those institutions grow over time? Who governs them, and which of the many competing and contradictory sociological and psychological models do we apply, first of all to define and identify "crazy," and then to apply the appropriate remedy? Further, what concrete example of such an application can you offer as proof that such a program works consistently on the local individual level, much less the international level?
Further, can you show through examples how such an institution sustains and protects itself through means other than power and violence?
No, I don't think you do. First of all, you dismiss it as an irrational fantasy. How would you feel about my opinion of your "compulsion" if I dismissed it as an irrational brand of paranoia? Not chuffed?
It feels like you're deliberately twisting my points, from which I surmise that you are merely starting from such a completely different set of assumptions that there is no possible conversation between us. However, I will attempt it nevertheless. Probably all this is a waste of time. Arguing on the internet, yay.
> Unfortunately for both of us, the truths of Machiavelli are not easily defeated, least of all by something as saccharine as "make love not war." The most tyrannical and imperialistic societies in history, from Rome to Stalin, often began with variations on such noble sentiments.
The "truths of Machiavelli" were written down in 16th Century Italy, in a time of constant warring and feuding between petty little dictators, at a time when it was acceptable to saw your enemies in half or cut off their balls and make them eat them, where rape and pillage were the way to conduct war, where assassination of political rivals was a primary political tool. They are not fit to be quoted in a discussion of how to conduct a democracy.
> "Care better for the crazy." In other words, anyone who means to do harm to the republic should be institutionalized? How? By force I assume. Who defines "crazy"? The history of international conflict unfortunately is not a story of the rational and benevolent vs. the "crazy and murderous", but of competing ideologies, scarce resources, and plain corruption.
That's a ridiculous straw-man interpretation of my statement. Your country has a great combination of a shitty healthcare system that is well known to fail the mentally ill (unlike the functioning healthcare systems of other countries) and wide availability of firearms. Strangely enough, this results in a higher incidence of shootings and other violent mass killings. Want to solve the problem? Reduce the number of guns and increase the number of services taking care of the mentally ill. How to diagnose them? The same way as in every other country.
> The problem with such naivete is that it assumes the problem is theoretical, and merely needs the correct sociological constructions and psychological theory implemented by benevolent institutions.
No, the problem is deeply practical: how to have less violence both from the inside and from the outside. The solution is deeply practical too: take better care of the mentally ill who tend to become mass murderers so they are in hospitals shooting valium instead of in school shooting toddlers, and don't do the multiply fucked up foreign policy things the US does that result in crazy people outside of the US wanting to cause it trouble.
> But how do those institutions grow over time? Who governs them, and which of the many competing and contradictory sociological and psychological models do we apply, first of all to define and identify "crazy," and then to apply the appropriate remedy? Further, what concrete example of such an application can you offer as proof that such a program works consistently on the local individual level, much less the international level?
See earlier point about how other countries "identify" mentally ill people. My understanding is that it comes through a combination of family and friends and medical professionals making assessments. Seems to work fine for the rest of the world.
Sorry, I should have qualified that, because I wasn't endorsing Machiavelli, only acknowledging his influence on our current context.
You're right about the violent times of The Prince. You're wrong about two things: the notion that it is removed at all from our contemporary environment (such brutality has not been surpassed in extremis in the last century alone? Please...), and the idea that the fundamental turn from the idealism of Plato and the ancients to the pragmatism of the moderns was not prefigured and in fact architected by Machiavelli. The philosophies of Real Politic and Neo-Conservatism (at least) are fundamentally Straussian/Machiavellian in origin.
All I can say about the rest of your points regarding the mentally ill is, I wish mental health was the world's biggest problem as you seem to think it is. But in this discussion it's a complete non sequitur.
These groups are like the militias that plague countries in civil war. They have chains of commands and objectives and whatnot. This isn't like bullying in schools, this is more like rival gangs , or maybe rival gangs vs. the school administration. The fact that you think it's about "destroying America" proves your point.
Out of curiosity though, can you point out the hypocrisy in US foreign policy? Almost all actions taken in the past half century have been done with explicit American interests in mind, just like any other country's. You'd probably find that a lot of American resentment is consequence of economic policy (crushing local agriculture with subsidized products doesn't make many happy campers) more than foreign policy. Granted, countries that have been invaded by the US are probably the exception.
EDIT: I don't necessarily disagree with your thesis though, any time this sort of thing comes up (is the "battle for intelligence" a thing), I think of this article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/BUGGER) which basically answers 'no' in a much more convincing way than anyone on HN has ever been able to do.
In general I think anyone who's willing to kill innocent people to make a political point is mentally ill to say the least, but mental illness is certainly not the only cause of international terrorism. It seems to be the main cause of national "terrorism", however, e.g. mass shootings (school or otherwise), anthrax letters and all that lot.
I'm not arguing that international terrorism is mostly caused by mental illness, though (even though the people who carry it out probably should be sent to a psych ward). That I blame on "foreign policy hypocrisy", which you ask about next.
The hypocrisy I refer to is repeated many times across the last 50 years or so of history. It's a pretty simple premise. The US presents itself as the champion of freedom and democracy and human rights, but tramples those abroad. It supports autocratic regimes in the middle east, selectively attacks oil-rich countries like Iraq on thin pretexts while pretending to do it "for the people", supports coups, assassinations, and other deeply disturbing things in south america, and I don't even want to get started to what they were up to in Vietnam...
Perhaps there would be less hate for the US abroad if it wasn't for this two-facedness. Don't get me wrong, I am a westerner through and through. I have no hatred for the US. However, I have also not had "the US is the champion of peace and freedom and democracy" shoved in my face while the US supported a tin-pot dictator in my country who shot half my family and gassed the other half. I can see how that might be much for some people (even relatively smart people) to bear.
The foreign policy of the US says "we're the good guys", but often acts the part of the bad guys. That's the hypocrisy I'm talking about.
If the intelligence community can't even have a reasonable relationship with the tiny minority of the most elite members of congress heading committees and authoring their bills, there is little hope for much else.
However - assuming a hypothetical - that US held a referendum (like they do in Switzerland) and majority of population voted for NSA surveillance / Guantanomo / drone strikes (ie all the issues that make most on HN viscerally uncomfortable). What then - can we still decry the fall of democracy?
Sure -- democracy is no guarantee. Referendums go wrong. Aaaand we're back to the Enlightenment political question of how best to balance the will of the masses (which can become a mob in the right circumstances, or an instrument of oppression to the minority) against the wisdom of representative government -- a republic. A sticky wicket indeed. The idealism here -- and I freely admit that it is based on a naive Modern optimism -- is that a transparent, representative democracy, rather than a direct democracy, corrupts more slowly over time and retains the highest possibility of self-reform of all types of governments.
We can leave aside the argument whether it's correct in this assessment (tangential here). Either way - it's not a case of majority deciding to oppress a minority (who are both parts of the same country), but rather issue of how a country should deal with the external world.
This is why recent revelations have proved so shocking. There has always been an assumption that checks and balances would prevent such fascist behavior from taking root. Instead, it's being legalized in secret courts without any public involvement. Now that behavior has been exposed, laws are being drafted to publicly legitimize what's been performed in private (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/10/sen-feinsteins-nsa-bil...).
All this in the name of security. In a country where the loudest politicians are publicly 'fiscally conservative', yet somehow the US still spends more on its military than the next 10 highest defense budgets combined (http://pgpf.org/Chart-Archive/0053_defense-comparison).
Where truly can the US go from here?
EDIT: BTW, I've no idea why your comment is not higher. Anyone downvoting it is not paying attention imo.
Of course the alternative is thinkable. History and politics and sociology classes are not that carefully censored and some people actually like the liberal arts. World history did not being with the US constitution and it'll go on past it, its already just a piece of paper as our leaders say, so I guess we are already in a post-constitutional era.
You won't be permitted to change things by voting. As has been said before, if voting could change anything it would be outlawed. You'll be given two choices, one who is in support of the NSA and says he opposes abortion but won't do anything about it, and the other who is in support of the NSA and says he supports a womans right to choose but won't do anything about it, because divide and conquer is how you control uneducated people, and no one is more uneducated than your average American, although there is a cultural goal to obtain training to obtain credentials to obtain a job to become a consumer.
The purpose of a democracy is to provide a tranquilizing influence on the masses once mass media exists, until mass media is conglomerated and mergered into only a few large controllable corporations. At that point democracy is not even needed as a soporific. This is the stage we're at now, confusion that we're subjects or serfs but not fully realizing it yet, just kinda confused.
This isn't just being grouchy or pessimistic; its a blueprint for the future. Want to know what will happen next election? Closest thing to a time machine ever invented? Read the above closely and guess what happens next based on it. History never repeats itself, but it does occasionally rhyme.
"its already just a piece of paper..."
"You won't be permitted to change anything..."
"if voting could change anything it would be outlawed..."
"You'll be given..."
"This is the stage..."
"The purpose of a democracy is..."
"its a blueprint..."
A litany of declarative bromides, delivered with pseudo-authority and strung together without forming a coherent thought, call to action or proscription for remedy. Such could only ever be pointless, nihilistic, and and anarchic.
Demagoguery in the making.
You missed predictive in your list. A model resulting in falsifiable observationally verifiable prediction about the future, resulting in the model either living to fight another day, or being disproven. I'm optimistic about my predictions and model passing the test, how bout you?
Not liking the future results of the theory, doesn't disprove the observation or theory behind it.
Also the "its just a piece of paper" is a quote from a recent former president, not me.
"falsifiable observationally verifiable prediction..."
Go back and read The Open Society and Its Enemies or Objective Knowledge. and you'll find this statement constitutes a fundamental misreading of Popper.
Never mind the fact that Popper was basically wrong and the notion of 'falsifiability' is a non-starter when it comes to practical application of political theory, Soros notwithstanding.
Perhaps a first step would be working to get instant runoff voting in place to break the back of the two party system. That would go a long ways to offer more than a difference in noise about narrow social issues (e.g. - abortion, gay rights) which actually have little to no impact on broader economic issues or privacy issues regarding freedom from blackmail or other persecution.
Perhaps the less you believe in life after death or a meaning of life, the more afraid you are of terrorists. The less likely you are to smoke cigarettes. The more you start to believe in technology. And so forth..
As if any of that would prevent the inevitable..
These thoughts are probably just the direct result of my current location (Buddhist Asia) and the South Park episode about NSA-surveillance. ;) (but its a good episode.)
I guess my point is: People need/want/tend to believe in something, and if that something isn't religion, it's something else.
Isn't there data that correlates an inverse relationship with education?
Combine that with a system intentionally designed to de-educate children and culture in general, and the future results aren't pretty, but are predictable.
I think you might be missing an aspect where "fear of terrorists" is an extremely thinly disguised "fear of non white people". or an aspect of "Finally, an excuse to attack Israel's enemies". Aside from the obvious military-industrial complex profit seeking corruption.
I understand that nobody is REALLY saying that something is valid just because it was in a TV show. But the fact that they couldn't think of a real life example of their position suggests to me that maybe they aren't informed enough to be having such strong opinions in the first place. For the Hacker News audience, it would be like opening an article on computer security with an example of "hacking" from the show NCIS (anyone who's ever watched it knows what I'm talking about).
How did this get voted up onto the front page? Are people forgetting the flag button?
9/11 resulted in preplanned implementation of security theater, because good security can be inconvenient, anything inconvenient must be good security, right?
(something that didn't happen) results in preplanned implementation of big brother style surveillance of the entire worlds population. Its profitable for contractors and hardware mfgrs and great for industrial espionage etc etc. Also it makes a population of dunces feel safer because (something that didn't happen) could have been prevented, in theory, by the new, Bigger Big Brother.
So... what was (something that didn't happen)? Were we as a nation planning on nuking SV and leaking the reaction plan before it happened eliminated the reason for us to nuke SV ourselves? We "need" a reason to attack Iran to extent WWIII in the ME, so I could see if some Cuban citizens nuke SV so we invade Iran and publicize the "new" spy programs. In that way, looking at what it cost to implement 9/11, program leakers are probably saving thousands of lives, maybe more, by skipping the Reichstag fire and going right to the oppression stage. How many people, as a country, were we planning to kill to implement the recently revealed spy programs?
On the other hand I sincerely believe that the US is way over the top with the reaction to 9/11. The terrorists wanted to destroy our fundamental liberal freedoms. By taking away those freedoms the uS Government seems to be confused on which side it is really fighting for.
If war had occurred, The U.S. could have been completely annihilated, utterly destroyed, ceased to exist. That's simply not the situation we face with today with Islamic terrorists.
It's reasonable to ask the question if we might be willing to accept a handful of causalities in exchange to remaining a free country. Than, take the money we're spending on the MIC and use it for safer pools and bathtubs, saving an order of magnitude more lives.
The US would need statesmanship beyond that of Churchill to galvanize and harden society against those eventualities.
Moreover, in an era of dirty bombs, chemical weapons and even full nuclear devices, the consequences might not always be merely a "handful of casualties," and the grotesque effects of certain weapons, particularly on children, would be images that would be highly likely to incite increasingly aggressive responses.
The US historically is not a society that is accustomed to the idea of being under any kind of siege, nor of allowing its families to remain under threat of any kind. That's not the underlying narrative, and it's just not in its DNA.
Of course, this is conveniently exploited for corporate smash and grab operations, and thus encouraged.
As for Nuclear Weapons, Al Qaeda obviously does not have the technology to make them, so their safety is almost entirely a factor of international cooperation in regarding their security in countries that do. Such cooperation regarding their most sensitive and strategically valuable weapons requires trust, something that will be in shorter supply if we continue unhindered economic and political espionage.
I'm no fan of what we in the US are doing now. It needs to stop and be reigned in or everything we stand for will be for not.